


Under the Ice

by Bil



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Adventure, Alternate Universe, Ancient Technology (Stargate), Antarctica, Banter, Elizabeth and John are BFFs, Exploring (not) Atlantis, Gen, John has the ATA gene and it does more than just turn the lights on, Pre-Season/Series 01, SO MUCH BANTER, Secret alien bases, Sentient Computers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-15
Updated: 2020-04-28
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:15:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23672932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bil/pseuds/Bil
Summary: AU. Antarctica is fun! Snow, ice, cold, secret alien bases... What’s not to like?A pre-Atlantis adventure for John and Elizabeth, set beforeRising. John&Elizabeth friendship.
Relationships: John Sheppard & Elizabeth Weir
Comments: 5
Kudos: 37





	1. I Think Ice Is Rather Nice

**Author's Note:**

> Season: pre-one.  
> Spoilers: Minor for Rising. General for SG-1.
> 
> Disclaimer: Soooo not mine. And not my fault that the characters have taken over my brain.
> 
> A/N: I don’t know if the Antarctic base where they’re studying the Ancient outpost ever had a real name in the show, but I’ve called it Gateway. On account of I needed to call it something. And what little science there is in this story is made up, so not accurate.

The helicopter landed in a flurry of snow despite their earlier efforts to clean up the Gateway landing site. Elizabeth looked away, shielding her face, while the rotors wound down to a lower speed. She peered over her arm as the wind lessened, and shook the snow from her hair. The pilot waved her over and she pulled her jacket closer against the wind and hurried to the passenger door.

She was handed a headset as she sat down and put it on, nudging the muffs into a more comfortable position with her shoulder while she reached for the seat straps, adept now at settling into a helicopter after these months of Antarctic living.

“There’s not quite enough of you to be three people,” the pilot’s voice crackled over her headset.

Elizabeth chuckled. “Doctor McKay made a discovery he is adamant needs to be explored right now and Peter – Doctor Grodin – got roped in. That just leaves me for McMurdo.”

The pilot’s helmeted head turned towards her. “This is why I don’t work with scientists,” he said with amusement. “So, you not important enough to get roped in, Doc, or you too important?”

She paused in doing up the buckles to frown at him. “Have we met?”

“No, ma’am,” he replied immediately. “I’m pretty sure I would remember that, ma’am.”

She frowned at him suspiciously; it was hard to tell under the helmet and sunglasses, but she didn’t think he was flirting with her. “Then how do you know I’m a doctor?” she prodded, adjusting the last strap.

The noise of the rotors expanded as the helicopter lifted off from the ground. “Only two types of people out here,” he drawled, pirouetting the machine with a grace she envied: “scientists and soldiers. You didn’t salute me, I didn’t get in trouble for not saluting you... that only leaves scientist.” Even with the helmet she could see the ironic look he shot her. “Must’ve just been a lucky guess, huh?”

“I salute your logic,” she said with a laugh.

Ten minutes later, Elizabeth was half way through a reminiscence of a general she’d been unfortunate enough to butt heads with when her pilot, who had been listening with sympathetic amusement, stiffened. She broke off immediately. “What is it?”

“I don’t know...” he said slowly, helmeted head tilting to look at his instruments and then out the window ahead. Following his gaze, she saw nothing more than normal majestic Antarctic scenery. “McMurdo, this is Sheppard, are you picking up anything out Gateway way?”

“Negative,” the voice crackled over her headset. “What do you see?”

“I don’t—What the hell?”

Elizabeth stared. “What _is_ that?” It looked like a wall of white and it was approaching them in a tearing hurry. If this had been a desert nearer the equator she might have thought it was a sandstorm, but Antarctica didn’t generally go in for sandstorms.

“I don’t know, but I sure as hell don’t want to stick around to find out.” The helicopter slewed around and she grabbed at her seat. Her pilot’s mouth was set in a grim line; Elizabeth stared back over her shoulder and saw the wall was gaining on them. “McMurdo, we have what looks like a massive snowstorm closing in on our position.” He reeled off their coordinates.

“Please repeat. Did you say snowstorm? Weather reports say all clear.”

“I don’t care if they say ‘pink elephants’, I can see the damn thing! We’re not going to make it back to Gateway, I’m setting us down.”

The helicopter dropped at an alarming rate, leaving Elizabeth’s stomach behind as it set down into a valley. She forced herself not to panic. After all, she’d spent weeks in cities where bombs went off on a regular basis – she’d faced down Goa’uld system lords! – so a snowstorm shouldn’t be too alarming. Despite her private pep talk she looked up worriedly at the as yet undisturbed cliffs overhead: that thing had been massive.

The rotor blades thrummed to a stop, allowing a loud roaring to reach her even through her earmuffs. She knew that sound: winds, tearing towards them. Her pilot offered her a wry grin. “Been nice knowing you, Doc.”

The world went white.

* * *

“Doc? Hey, Doc, you okay?”

Someone was shaking her shoulder. Elizabeth managed to open her eyes and look around. She was still in the helicopter, even still strapped in, though her headset was on the floor at her feet. “We survived?”

“Unless Hell’s basically the same as Earth, yeah, I’d say so.” Her pilot had taken his helmet and glasses off to reveal an attractive man with smiling brown eyes and the most unruly hair she’d yet met. “’Sides, I don’t think you and I are gonna wind up in the same place when we’re dead.”

“I’ll think of a witty retort to that in a moment,” she informed him. “What just happened?”

“Search me. Storms don’t just pop up out of nowhere so we usually get some warning of them from satellite imaging. Something that big should’ve been picked up.” He grabbed his helmet and put it on. “McMurdo, do you copy? McMurdo? McMurdo, do you read me?” Silence. He pulled the helmet off and frowned at it. “Guess it’s just you and me, Doc.”

She looked around for the first time and realised that either they couldn’t see out the windows or there was nothing to see. It was white. She leaned closer to the window, her breath misting on the glass and getting in the way. It looked like the helicopter was in some kind of featureless ice cavern with smooth white walls. “That’s not what I would expect after a snowstorm,” she said with surprise. What on earth had happened?

“No...” he agreed. “Wanna have a look ‘round?”

“This doesn’t bother you?” They’d been attacked by a rogue snowstorm and now they were somewhere impossible.

“I’ll let you know. Come on.” He opened his door and jumped out, taking a few cautious steps forward. Elizabeth watched him a moment and then fumbled hastily with her seatbelt and followed his example. The floor seemed solid enough, but then it had to be if it was holding up a helicopter. She walked around with more confidence. The room was about fifteen by fifteen metres with no obvious entrances, and it was too square to be natural. It was like being trapped in a walk-in freezer with the door iced over.

“Not even a hole in the roof.” The voice made her jump and she spun to see that her pilot had come up behind her. “Don’t ask me how we got in here, because I haven't a clue.”

“Could we have dropped into a natural cavity in the snow and the storm covered it over...?” He gave her an incredulous look as she trailed off. “No, I suppose not. Well? Do you have any better ideas?”

“Yup.” He turned back to the helicopter and yanked the back door open. “I say we make sure we can survive whatever this is and _then_ worry about how it happened. Because seriously, Doc, this is crazy.” He hauled himself up into the chopper. “And I wasn’t trained to deal with crazy.” He poked his head back out the door to look at her. “But survival, that I can do.”

He handed her a pack and even though she braced herself to take it she staggered slightly under its weight. Her notion of physical exercise was taking Sedge for a run, not lifting weights. “What’s this?”

“That,” he said, shoving boxes around with thumps, “is your route to survival. Keep it with you at all times and don’t go anywhere without it.”

Elizabeth looked around the blank, featureless room with its noticeable lack of exits. “Where am I supposed to go?” she asked with some irony. Either he didn’t hear her or he decided to ignore her, because he didn’t answer. There was a very loud thump and a muffled curse, making her drop the pack and step forward hastily. “Hey! What are you doing in there?”

“Just trying to kill myself.” He appeared at the door again, shaking a hand. “Dammit, that _hurt_. Okay, since there’s just the two of us we’ve got rations for at least a couple of weeks. I’d say we could probably survive a month if we’re careful.”

“A _month_?” She had no intention of being lost that long.

“Water... is going to be a bit more of a problem.”

“We’re surrounded by the stuff!”

“That’s the assumption I went on when I kitted out this bird, so I didn’t stick much in. Fuel for melting it, sure, but not water. But tell me, Doc, do you really want to chance digging away at the walls of this place when we don’t even know how it got here?”

“When you put it like that,” she acknowledged, “not really.”

He dropped a second pack down onto the floor. “It probably won’t be a problem, but I’d rather not have to find out, if you know what I mean.” He joined her on the floor. “Meanwhile, I’ve turned on the locator beacon and we can try the radio every hour. They’ll be looking for us after that rather spectacular exit we just made. Old Donovan might be a bit sour, but he looks out for us flyboys. He’ll take it as a personal insult if the weather gets us before he does.”

“You almost make it sound as if he has a grudge against it.”

“He does, if you ask me,” he said with a grin. “Him and the weather are old enemies. We’ll be fine, Doc. All we have to do is hang on till they get here.”

“I wonder how much snow we’re under.”

He picked up on the unspoken ‘and will they be able to find us under it?’ and his grin widened. “Not so hot on the optimism thing, are you? Here I am, trying to keep you positive, and you’re not buying it for a second.”

“I’m just being realistic,” she said, returning his smile. “I’m annoying like that sometimes.”

“Only sometimes?” She rolled her eyes. “Seriously though, they’ll find us. We’ve gotten pretty good at snow rescue around here.”

“Gateway might be able to help out too,” she said thoughtfully. Who knew what those Ancient devices might be able to do with the right stimulus?

He gave her a curious look rather than the sceptical one she would have expected if she’d thought before speaking. “Really? You doing sensor research down there or something?”

“We’re researching a lot of things,” she said truthfully.

“Okay, okay, I can take a hint. Considering the clearance I need just to be able to land there, I shoulda known better than to ask.”

She smiled. “Yes, you should have, Major.”

“A scientist who knows military? You’re an enigma, Doc, I’ll give you that.”

“It _is_ written on your jacket,” she pointed out.

“In shorthand. Most geeks I’ve ferried haven’t a clue what that means. Or to look for it.”

“I’m not a geek,” she protested mildly as she looked around the small room. “So what do we do now?”

“Now? Now we wait.” He stepped away from the helicopter, trailing his pack behind him and took a look around the room. She followed him. “Unless you’ve got a better idea? Say, one that gets us out of here?”

“I—”

There was a noise, a _whump_ , followed by a hum and then singing sounds as something encircled them. “Aw, crap,” she heard her companion say in the instant before a bright light swallowed them up.

* * *

“You know,” John heard himself say as the blazing light died away and the ring things disappeared up into the roof, “I was being very careful and didn’t even _think_ the words ‘It can’t get any worse’.”

His companion’s chuckle was genuine, which made him feel better about the situation. He looked around warily, wondering what had just happened. The chopper was gone. That was his first clue that something was wrong. His second was that the walls were no longer white.

“What the hell? What was that and where are we? Did we fall through a hole in the floor or something?”

The doctor he was doing a poor job of ferrying to McMurdo didn’t respond, too busy looking about with recognition in her eyes. “This is impossible,” she said softly.

“At least it fits in with the rest of this crazy trip, then,” he said. He looked up at the ceiling. It was decorated with a weird circular motif and completely lacked the remnants of any holes they could have slid down. “Doc, do you have _any_ idea what’s going on here? First we get a snowstorm out of nowhere, then we land in an impossible room, and now – now we’ve moved without moving.”

“Rings,” she muttered, still ignoring him. “That must have been a set of transporter rings. We assumed that they were invented by them, but this must be...” She stepped forward and John realised that they were standing on a circle of ice that stood about a metre above the floor and had the same radius as the circular motif in the ceiling. Weird.

He looked around the room for further signs of weirdness. It was a high-ceilinged room made to feel like the ice of Antarctica, done in greys and blues with lots of angular decorative lattices and archways with geometric patterns on them. He’d roomed once with a guy who was really into fantasy battle games, and what this place shouted at him was “dwarves”. Or maybe dwarves as done by elves, since the place had a weird ethereal beauty vibe going on too.

His companion slid down onto the floor and looked quizzically at the block of ice. “We must have activated them somehow and they had to pick up the ice on top of the floor to get to us.”

“Activated what?” John demanded, but she didn’t seem to hear him. He followed her down and pulled his pack towards him, glad that whatever it was just happened, the packs had come too. Digging around in his pack, he kept an eye on the doctor as she circled the room, and pulled out his Beretta. Leaning casually against the block of ice, he watched her stop to stare at a back-lit piece of latticework as he loaded the pistol.

Her head came up at the sound of the magazine slotting into place. “I really don’t think that will be necessary, Major,” she snapped.

“Antarctica isn’t too forgiving, Doc. I’d rather not take any chances.”

“This isn’t Alaska. No polar bears.”

“No,” he agreed, and didn’t put the gun away.

She scowled briefly, but didn’t push the issue. He didn’t much like her disapproval, but he’d learnt a long time ago not to take chances. Well, not too many. Not unless it seemed necessary, anyway. Shaking off the need to qualify his statement, he frowned around the room and wondered why there was such a place under the Antarctic ice. Not to mention how it was adequately lit and who had built the weird architecture that wasn’t like anything he recognised (unless you counted the dwarves and elves). With a shrug he stepped forward, gun in hand, to take a better look at the nearest wall.

It slid away at his approach and turned out to be a door. He hesitated, wary, his eyes flickering from side to side and his gun rising instinctively. No one jumped out at him. The doctor rushed to his side and peered with delight into the corridor that had been opened up before them, as well lit as the room they stood in. The room was at the end of the corridor, which stretched out emptily into the distance. “Okay, Doc, I give. Automatic doors? _What_ is going on here?”

“But this is Ancient!” she exclaimed excitedly. “I’m certain of it! We never suspected the outpost came out so far!”

“Wanna fill me in, Doc?” he asked with enough exasperation to penetrate her enthusiasm.

She looked at him as if suddenly remembering his existence, her face going in an instant from open and excited to closed and wary. He didn’t like the change. “It’s classified,” she said automatically.

“Now generally that’d make me back down like a good boy, but seriously, Doc, you want help getting out of here you’re gonna have to fill me in.” She bit her lip uncertainly. “I do have clearance enough to make it to Gateway,” he prodded.

“I’ll think about it,” she said, staring out at the corridor and avoiding his eyes, and he knew that that was all he was going to get right now. Revealing classified information was a big deal, he reluctantly acknowledged. Even when he was smack dab in the middle of it. After all, she hardly knew him.

“I’m John Sheppard,” he added helpfully. “Though since you figured out my rank, I’m pretty sure you already knew that.” She looked at him questioningly. “If we get to know each other you might be able to trust me better.”

Her lips quirked in a reluctant smile. “Doctor Elizabeth Weir.”

“Aha, the big guns! If I’d know you were going to be on board I’d’ve polished the chopper.”

“You’ve heard of me?”

“Heard of you! Do you know how many disgruntled scientists I’ve ferried back to McMurdo who complained about you the whole trip?” She stared at him and he couldn’t keep his lips from twitching. “Kidding, Doc. Just kidding. Heard nothing but good things.”

“I should hope so.” She bumped his shoulder chidingly with hers. “If you’ve quite finished having a laugh at my expense?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

She rolled her eyes at his comically reluctant tone and stepped forward. “Come on, let’s take a look around.”

“Hey, wait a minute, Doc!” He grabbed at her arm. When she stopped to glare at him he dashed back and grabbed the packs. “I said don’t go anywhere without this, remember?”

She accepted the pack he shoved into her arms and grimaced. “I didn’t really think you were serious.”

“Deadly serious, Doc. This is Antarctica. You take the wrong step in the wrong weather and you’re lost. You got no supplies with you, lost means dead.”

“Are you naturally paranoid, or do they train you that way?” She hoisted the pack onto her back and did up the straps.

He grinned, copying her. “Bit of both, ma’am. So, we going? Or are we going to do the sensible thing to do when people are searching for you and stay put?” She looked at him. “Okay, dumb question. When are scientists ever sensible? Lay on, McDuff.”

“Actually,” she said absently as she obediently took the lead, looking about her in awe, “I’m not a scientist, I’m a diplomat.”

“Seriously? What are you doing out here, then?”

She looked back at him, eyes smiling. “I like a puzzle.”

He chuckled and trailed after her, keeping an eye on the corridor ahead in case something decided to jump out at them. “Jigsaw puzzles? ‘Cause I hate those.”

“Too dull for you?”

“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with liking—”

“Anything that goes at more than two hundred miles an hour?”

He squinted suspiciously at the back of her head. “You sure you don’t read minds or something?”

“No, Major,” she threw over her shoulder, “I just know your type.”

“Excuse me? My _type_?”

“You’re an adrenalin junkie. Most Air Force pilots are, in my experience. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“For your information,” he said, irked by her casual pigeon-holing, “I also like Ferris Wheels.”

“Really?” She looked back at him curiously. “How come?”

“There always has to be a _why_ with you people, doesn’t there? See, now this is why I don’t work with scientists.”

“I’m not a scientist,” she reminded him.

“Whatever. Diplomats are even worse.” They came to a fork in the corridor and he looked back the way they’d come. “That was an awful long bit of corridor to have nothing down it but just that one room.”

“There were probably other rooms that were locked,” she said offhandedly, peering down the two corridors ahead, both of which were dark and identical. She sounded certain rather than suggesting a theory, as if she’d had prior experience. Of weird, crazy rooms under the ice with magical transporter systems. But this couldn’t be some top secret base they were in because no one had come to take them into a holding cell and threaten them with guns. Besides, top secret bases didn’t usually care about design aesthetics.

“Look, Doc, I’m trying to be patient and all, but this is really starting to freak me out.”

She paused in her inspection of the corridors to look at him pensively, and he could just about see the thoughts flickering behind her eyes. “Call me Elizabeth.”

“All right, _Elizabeth_. What the hell’s going on?”

“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “But if I can find something resembling a control centre I should be able to contact Gateway and get us out of here—”

“And I’ll be ordered to forget everything. Fine,” he sulked. “There’s a flashlight in your pack. You want it?”

“Yes, please.” She turned around so that he could pull it out and he handed it to her. “Thank you.” She retrieved his for him in turn and hesitated as she put it into his hand, looking up at him. “Major, I’m sorry I can’t—”

“Yeah, I know. It’s okay. Really,” he added when she kept frowning at him. “I’ve spent half my life in the Air Force, you’d think I’d know better than to demand answers people can’t give me. It’s just this is so...”

She gave him a sympathetic smile. “I know, Major.”

He shrugged. “Hey, call me John.”

With a nod, she said, “John. Shall we?”

“After you.” He waved her forward and followed her into the right-hand corridor, wondering how she’d chosen which way to go. Did she _know_ or was it just a guess? What _was_ this place? “Bit chilly in here, isn’t it?” He blew on his gloved fingers, which naturally did nothing to help, and rubbed his hands together. “Don’t suppose you know how to turn the heat up a bit?” They were approaching the edge of the light so he switched his flashlight on.

Elizabeth copied him. “Sorry, John, I—”

The lights came on, first the ones directly overhead and then moving up the corridor in sequence. They froze in place. “Okay...” John ventured. “That’s spooky. Who’s doing that?”

Elizabeth looked as confused as he was. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “There shouldn’t be anyone this far from Gateway – and there _can’t_ be anyone left. Not after all this time.”

He was dying of curiosity but forced himself not to ask; he did have occasional bouts of self-control, after all. They switched their flashlights off, since they were completely unnecessary, and moved cautiously onwards. The lights lit up about a dozen metres in front and an equal distance behind, the lights ahead of them flickering on as they proceeded and those behind turning off. Definitely automated, then. Hey, maybe this was Hitler’s secret Nazi base. There was supposed to be one in Antarctica, right? If you liked conspiracy theories, anyway. Did they have automatic lights in the 1940s?

John wondered if the ice had gotten into his brain and decided he’d better stop thinking and just let Elizabeth get them out. Speaking of which... “Do you actually know where we’re going?” he asked. “You don’t have, say, a map or something?”

She tossed him a faint smile, wonder lighting her eyes. Whatever was going on, she was enjoying it. “Sorry.”

There was a corner coming up. John hastened ahead so that he could lean against the wall and peer around it, gun at the ready. “All clear.” Elizabeth rolled her eyes and stalked around the corner. “Hey, we can’t be too careful,” he pointed out. “You said you didn’t know of anyone out here, but that doesn’t mean someone else couldn’t have gotten here first.”

“You truly are paranoid,” she shot back at him.

“I prefer to call it... cautious. What’s that?”

Something on the wall ahead was glowing, strongly in the dark and then dimly as the lights turned on. As they approached it they saw a panel which turned out to show a map, presumably of the complex they were attempting to explore.

Elizabeth raised an eyebrow at him. “You wanted a map, Major?”

“John.” There was no need to get snippy with him just because she didn’t like his idea of caution. “Okay, so _now_ do you know where we’re going?” He squinted at the map. “Can you read that? I don’t recognise that writing.”

“You wouldn’t,” she said absently, running her finger along half an inch above the screen and frowning as she traced out a path to her control centre. “The language is actually quite similar to Latin.”

“Uh, no,” he said flatly. “I know a bit of Latin and that does _not_ look like Latin.”

“No, the writing isn’t—You speak Latin?”

He shrugged. “Only a bit.” She was still looking at him. “What, I can’t know things now?”

The corners of her mouth quirked in a slight smile. “Yes, John, you’re allowed to know things.”

“You just don’t expect it of my ‘type’.”

She looked away. “I’m sorry, that was rude of me.”

“Well, I thought so.”

Studying him, her head on a slight angle, she said, “It really bothered you, didn’t it?”

“No!” he protested immediately. “Of course not. You were right about the two hundred miles an hour thing.”

“But I still made assumptions about you. I’m sorry, I’ll try not to do that again.”

“You do that,” he agreed hastily, uneasy with the conversation. “So! You know where we’re going yet?”

“I think I do.” She took another look at the map and nodded. “Yes, I think so. This way.”

They took three steps before a door slid open beside them. “I didn’t do it,” John said automatically as the lights in the room flickered on. It looked like some sort of living room, with couches and a table. “Whoa! Let me go first.” Elizabeth stopped at the door and gave him a Look. “Just humour me, okay? I’d feel better if I made sure it’s safe before you go in.”

“I can take care of myself, Major,” she said sternly.

“I’m sure you can, _Doctor_ , but this is what I’m trained for. You do... diplomatic-y things and I make sure you’re alive to do them. I wouldn’t tell you how to run peace talks, or whatever it is you guys do.”

She stepped back from the door, but said, “I have a feeling you probably would.”

“Well, maybe,” he agreed, eliciting a smile. “But only if you were doing it wrong.” She laughed and, relieved, he scoped out the room and told her she could come in.

“How kind of you,” she said sarcastically, but with a smile in her eyes.

He held up his hands in surrender. “Hey, I’m just doing my job. My orders are to get you safe to McMurdo and that’s what I’m going to do, okay?”

“Okay,” she agreed. “I’ll try not to be too sensitive. I’m just fond of my independence.”

“Hey, me too. Why do you think I like flying so much?” She opened her mouth. “Wait, don’t answer that!” The eyebrow went up again in an expression of demure mockery and John grinned. “You’re not so bad, Doc.”

“Why, thank you, Major, I’ll take that as a compliment.” She looked around the room. “There doesn’t look to be anything here that could help us.”

“But you want to stay anyway.”

With a quick shake of her head, not a negative response but more of a freeing herself of thoughts, she stepped towards the door. “You have no idea.” She paused at the door and looked back at him. “Would you like to go first, John, so you can protect me from the big bad shadows?”

“Hey, you never know when those shadows’ll turn nasty. You can’t be too careful.” He took the lead, but paused just outside the door. “Is it just me, or is it getting warmer in here?”

_To be continued..._


	2. If You’re Going Crazy, Raise All Three Hands

The next room they stumbled across, quite literally, was a little different.

John blithely ignored Elizabeth’s warning about an untied bootlace with the inevitable consequence that he stood on it and lost his balance. As he clutched at the wall for support it slid away from him, sending him tumbling into the room before he caught himself hastily.

“Oh, be quiet,” he grumbled at Elizabeth as he scanned the room for threats, narrowing his eyes at shadows that disappeared as the lights came on.

“I didn’t say anything,” she said with perfect truth (and far too much amusement for his self-esteem) as she stepped into the room.

He held up a hand. “Just wait a sec.” It was a large room and he wanted to be sure—

“John, I don’t think that dead trees are going to threaten me in any way.”

He finished his survey and relaxed. “Hey, you never know. I saw this movie once where there were these trees and...” He caught Elizabeth’s dubious look. “And never mind that. This is turning into a really weird place.”

Elizabeth didn’t reply, just looked around with interest.

The room was about three storeys high, littered with beds of soil planted with highly dead trees and bushes. The roof was made up of patches of blue-white framed in the darker blue-grey of the complex walls. The patches looked oddly familiar and out of keeping with the rest of the décor. It took him a moment to realise that they must be skylights, with ice piled up on top of them and stopping the light they’d once let in.

“Guess this place has been abandoned a while,” he said, lowering his gaze again. There was a fountain off to one side, no longer running and even the basin now completely dry. This might have been a nice place back in its day.

Elizabeth muttered something that sounded like “Only ten thousand years” but he must have misheard her. She wandered off to the right, looking around her with awe and enthusiastic wonder. “I wouldn’t have expected to find an arboretum,” she mused, more to herself than John. “I wonder what they did during winter. They would have had to rely on artificial lighting.”

John watched her explorations with a fascinated eye, perplexed by her enthusiasm and the way her eyes lit up at a musty old room – though come to think of it, it wasn’t actually musty; the air filtration system must still be running – filled with dead trees and a couple of signs (written in no language he recognised). She was a diplomat? Seemed more like a scientist to him.

Which he didn’t mean in a bad way, but scientists were usually the ones who got excited like that because of the impact of discoveries on their work or whatever. Diplomats, in John’s experience, smiled a lot but didn’t laugh much, said a lot but told you nothing, and slid gracefully around tricky questions like greased eels (or politicians).

Elizabeth wasn’t like that at all.

“So why’d you become a diplomat?” he asked, strolling up behind her as she inspected the defunct fountain.

She glanced up at him with a smile. “I was young, idealistic, and not a little arrogant. I thought I could orchestrate world peace.”

“Huh. You getting there?”

“It’s rather a large job for one person.”

“Nah. I bet you could do it.”

“I’m a little old for that sort of hubris,” she decided. “No. I can’t save the world, but I can help a few people. Be a voice for those who have no voice of their own.”

He grinned at her. “So instead of being young and idealistic you’re now old—old _er_ ,” he corrected at her look, “and idealistic.”

“Is there something wrong with that?” she asked with a smile.

“Nah, the world could use a bit more idealism.”

“Perhaps.” She started walking again, around the fountain and toward the other side of the room. “How about you? What made you join the Air Force?”

Following her, he eyed the back of her head. “You’re not much fond of the Air Force, are you?”

“In my experience there are better ways to solve a problem than brute force.”

“Right up to the point that Hitler invades your backyard.”

“Maybe so, but that doesn’t answer my question.”

Allowing her to change the subject, he considered his answer. “When I was five I decided I wanted to be an astronaut. I must have driven my teachers up the wall, because I couldn’t draw a picture or write a story without involving some kind of spaceship.” She smiled. “I thought I’d actually get to go places, though, not just hang around in orbit. But by the time I figured that out, when I was eleven, my dad took me on my first trip in a plane. I got to see in the cockpit and everything and I realised that it wasn’t space I was interested in, but flying.”

“But why the Air Force? There are other ways to fly.”

He shrugged. “Sure, but the Air Force has the best jets.”

“So the guns weren’t appealing?”

“I was eighteen, of course they were. A bit less appealing once I found out what they could do, but... Plus, joining pissed off Dad. Not that that’s a reason, but it was definitely a bonus.”

“I can see you as the rebellious teen,” she mused. “But that wouldn’t make you stay.”

“No, but I’ve got...”

“A hero complex?” she suggested and he pulled a face at her.

“Protectiveness issues,” he temporised. “Look, you make a difference by waging peace. _I_ make a difference by making sure people like you survive to do that.”

To his surprise, she accepted that. “So how did you wind up in Antarctica?”

“It was the only continent I hadn’t been to. So I figured what the hell, I’d give it a try. How’d _you_ wind up here? Not much call for diplomats around here. Seals aren’t too hot on talking things over.”

She smiled. “I had... previous experience.”

“Classified previous experience,” he corrected.

“Precisely.”

“So I guess there’s no point in me asking further?”

She looked him up and down. “No.”

John sighed. “Fine.” He looked around. “We done here?”

“I suppose so,” she said reluctantly. John rolled his eyes, but only when she wasn’t looking. What was so fascinating about a bunch of desiccated plants?

Three mysterious rooms later they stopped for an unappealing lunch. Somehow, no matter how many years he ate military rations they never tasted any better. John sighed and looked around to see where Elizabeth had gotten to. She was on her knees beside a wall panel, her lunch forgotten beside her as she ran her fingers over the weird words inscribed on it and muttered to herself.

“You’re supposed to be eating,” he pointed out. Turning in surprise, she blinked at him as if she’d forgotten there was a world outside of the words on the panel. “Don’t make me come over there and force feed you,” he warned.

She smiled, touched the wall panel with a wondering look in her eyes, and then picked up her food and stood, chewing absently and brushing off her knees unnecessarily. “Sorry. I will eat.”

“You do that a lot?”

“Do what?”

“Forget to eat?”

She shrugged. “It’s been known to happen.”

“You _sure_ you’re not a scientist?”

She laughed. “Yes, John.”

He rolled his eyes as she started wandering the room again. At least this time she was eating.

“Hey, I’ve got a question.”

Stopping, she looked back at him. “Oh?”

“Yeah. Where’s the dust?”

“What?”

“Where’s the dust? We haven’t seen any sign of anyone down here and the place looks completely abandoned, but there isn’t even a little bit of dust. There must be someone around. A janitor or something.” He looked around the empty room. “Somewhere.” Surely a place this size, advanced enough to have automatic doors, wouldn’t just be abandoned? It made him nervous.

Elizabeth looked thoughtful. “I suppose that—” She cut herself off and looked at him.

John sighed. Shoulda seen that one coming. “Yeah, yeah, I know, classified. Fine. You done eating? Let’s go.”

After several more mysterious rooms they found one that looked like a high-tech lab. John scrutinised what appeared to be a blank computer screen (though not of any kind _he’d_ ever seen before) while Elizabeth flittered about the room like a delighted bee in a room full of honey. High-tech equipment in a lost base abandoned under the ice? Too weird.

He leant closer to the probably-a-screen and it flashed on. “Whoa!” John jumped back and watched it suspiciously. Screeds of what he assumed was data scrolled down the screen. “Did I do that?”

“John?” Elizabeth came to his side and studied the screen, a light of discovery in her eyes.

He gave her a cock-eyed look. “You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?”

“Well, aren’t you?” She looked at him with that eyebrow raised again. “No one’s stood in these rooms for thousands of years! We’re the first to come here in living memory!”

He groaned. “Come on, Elizabeth, you’re killing me here! We’ve found some kind of lost base under the ice of Antarctica – which has been ice for millions of years, may I point out – with automatic doors and the lights still on. And computers! And I’m not even going to go into that elevator thing. This is crazy! And the only explanations I can come up with are even crazier.”

“Oh?” she said with interest. “What have you got?”

He sighed. “Okay, Elizabeth, I’ll play your game, but you have _got_ to tell me what’s going on.” She gave him an encouraging nod that promised nothing. “Okay then, first guess... an abandoned alien base. Don’t ask me what aliens were doing on Earth, because I haven’t got that far. It’s that, or the lost city of Atlantis isn’t in Cuba, or where ever they said it was on that documentary I wasn’t really watching.”

She gave him a funny look. “Are _you_ telepathic, John?”

“I don’t think so. Why?” She walked away around the lab and he trailed after her. “Are you trying to tell me I’m _right_?”

“On both counts.”

“On both—” He stopped walking. She smiled enigmatically and didn’t. He jogged to catch up, stopping in front of her so he could look in her eyes. “You’re serious. I mean, seriously serious?”

She smiled. “I’m quite serious, John.”

“Really serious?” he persisted. “You’re not just trying to see how gullible us Air Force guys are?”

There was still a faint smile on her lips, but her eyes were solemn. “I’m serious.”

“I don’t believe you.” He looked around the room. “Nah, it can’t be.” He shook his head firmly. “No. I’m going to wake up in a minute and find myself in my bunk back at McMurdo and you’re just a dream trying to mess with my head.”

The smile crept back up to her eyes. “I suppose I can’t be sure about the dream part, but I promise you I’m not trying to mess with your head.”

The stupid thing was, he believed her. And he didn’t think this was a dream – his dreams weren’t like this. “Aw, crap.” He turned away, running his hands through his hair. “Aliens? And Atlantis. _Crap_!” He spun back to face her. “Really?” He wasn’t sure if he was pleading for this to be real or a dream. He’d never been much into sci-fi except for honking great space battles.

“Well, technically this isn’t actually Atlantis, it’s the section they left behind when the Atlanteans went somewhere else, but... Yes, John. Really.”

“Crap.” He tried to take this in, trying to fit these crazy facts into his worldview as he paced back and forth. Elizabeth just watched him. “I don’t know what’s worse: that this is real or that I believe you! What the hell have you done to me, Elizabeth?” She chuckled and he had to do the same. “Sorry. I’m not taking this very well, am I?”

“Pretty well, considering,” she reassured him. “It’s not as though you had any warning.”

“Except for the transporter thing. That really _was_ a transporter, then? I thought I must have, I don’t know, blacked out or something.”

“That’s quite natural,” she said. “After all, the most obvious explanation couldn’t possibly be correct, could it?”

“No!” he agreed fervently. “I mean... Really real?”

She chuckled again. “I had much the same reaction when Kinsey told me. Well, not about this exactly, but something closely related. He had to give me a note from the President to get me to believe him.”

He laughed at that. “Name-dropping, Elizabeth?”

“No!” she protested with a look of horror.

John relented. “I don’t think I’d believe the President if he told me this in person,” he told her, wiping his hand across his face and wondering if the look of disbelief was going to be permanent. “But I believe _you_ , Elizabeth. So, Atlantis was an alien base in Antarctica. God, Mitch would love this!”

“You can’t tell anyone,” she said sharply. “This is classified, Major.”

“I couldn’t tell him if I wanted to,” he said simply. “He’s dead.”

“Oh.” She stared at him with wide eyes, caught completely wrong-footed. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

“No problem,” he waved her off. “So how did you guys find out about this?” He could tell from the look on her face it was a long, complicated story. “I’m going to regret asking, aren’t I?”

She laughed, and explained.

* * *

Elizabeth watched with amusement as John tried to cope with the information overload she had just dumped on him. Even the highly edited version was a lot to take in. Stunned, he just stared at her before saying weakly, “This is the point where Donovan jumps out and says ‘Gotcha!’, right?”

She frowned. “I didn’t think he sounded the sort to play practical jokes.”

“He’s not. That’s why it’d be appropriate.”

Elizabeth smiled.

He looked at her quizzically, still trying to take in everything she’d just told him, and she admired his sangfroid. She still remembered her own initiation into the stargate secret with some embarrassment. “So let me get this straight. The US government has spent the last seven years secretly using alien technology to go to other planets.”

“Eight years, if you count the first mission, but yes, that’s correct.”

“And no one’s noticed.”

“No.”

He grinned at her and shook his head in disbelief. “Only in America.”

“You’d be surprised,” she said softly. She should be feeling guilty that she was breaking her non-disclosure agreement without authorisation, but somehow she wasn’t. After all, they had to get out of here. And she trusted him; she liked the smile in his eyes and the way he defended his opinions. And the way he went about their explorations, even if it irritated her, was exactly what they would need on an alien planet – exactly what they would need when they found Atlantis. She hadn’t meant to tell him, certainly not this soon, but his guesses had been so precise that she’d been surprised into giving herself away and then having begun she’d just continued.

She didn’t regret it. She wasn’t sanguine about her chances of getting them out of this place in a hurry and she was going to need help, and he wouldn’t be much help if he didn’t know what was really going on. As far as security went, if he had clearance to land at Gateway then he wasn’t a risk – quite the opposite, in fact: that meant the people in charge trusted him enough that they would’ve let him into the stargate secret themselves if she’d pushed.

With O’Neill’s backing she had a fairly free hand to invite people she thought appropriate on her expedition, and although that had been intended for scientists rather than military, the General would still back her up. Technically she should still have gone through the motions of getting approval _before_ releasing top secret information, but the higher ups weren’t here. And it wasn’t as if she was telling John everything. She was, in fact, telling him very little. “You’d be surprised,” she repeated, brushing away her thoughts; what was done was done and there was no point in worrying about it.

“I’m starting to think I would be,” he said, unaware of her inner monologue and still trying to deal with what she’d told him. “I knew we were good at keeping secrets, but this is crazy! What’s next, the moon is really made of cheese? Yes, and the President’s under the mind-control of the mice who live there!”

Elizabeth laughed. “You are a very strange man, John Sheppard.”

“So I’m told,” he agreed with a lopsided grin. “But you do realise that _you_ are in charge of an abandoned alien base. With teleporters and wormholes and parasitic aliens. I think you’ve got a monopoly on strange, Elizabeth. Seriously, I feel like I’ve fallen into a sci-fi movie.” He brightened suddenly. “Does this mean we get to have giant space battles?”

That made her laugh again. “You remind me of Lieutenant Ford,” she told him.

“He likes space battles?”

“Explosions in general. If it goes bang, he’s happy.”

He nodded. “I like the sound of this guy.”

“I think you’ll get along just fine.” In fact, she was rather looking forward to watching it.

“So, space battles?” he persisted.

Elizabeth shook her head with a smile. “You look like a little boy waiting to be told if Christmas is coming. Yes, John, we manage to have the occasional space battle. You didn’t happen to see some strange lights in the sky from McMurdo back just before Gateway was set up, did you? Assuming you were here then, of course.”

“Sure. We had a couple of geeks call in who explained they were—Wait a minute! Space battles?” He leaned back against the nearest table and grinned. “Cool. So where do I sign up to fly in these things?”

“Take that up with your CO, not me,” she said, chuckling at his enthusiasm. What was he, seven?

“Right.” He pushed himself up from the table. “Let’s go find this control room of yours. The sooner we’re out of here, the sooner I can get myself a spaceship.”

She rolled her eyes in amusement and followed him out of the room. “Hey, wait up, John!”

“Why don’t you just hurry up?” he retorted, but slowed his steps obligingly.

“You’ve got longer legs than me,” she said reasonably as she hurried to catch up to him.

“Oh, come on, that’s not an excuse!” he whined, his eyes laughing at her. “That’s just pathetic.”

“I’ll give you pathetic,” she threatened. “Lend me your gun for a moment.”

He hastily pulled it out of her reach. “Why?” he drawled suspiciously.

“So I can shoot you in the leg and make it fairer, of course.” She said it so matter-of-factly that he just stared at her for a moment as if he couldn’t quite understand what she’d said.

Then his eyes lit with humour. “Bloodthirsty little thing, aren’t you?”

“Who are you calling little?” she demanded.

He quickly side-stepped out of reach. “I mean, uh, I didn’t—” A door swished open beside him. “Oh look, a door!” he said gratefully, making her grin. She went to push past him and he held up a hand. “Hey, me first. You know,” he added, “we’d get where ever it is we’re going a whole lot faster if we didn’t keep stopping to explore every room we find.” She glared at him, still remembering the ‘little’ crack, and he back-pedalled. “But hey, you’re the boss, so exploring it is.”

She laughed, then sighed impatiently as he warily preceded her into the room. “John, there’s no one here. If there were we would have found them by now.”

“Caution is a virtue,” he countered, making her smile despite herself.

“I don’t think that’s quite how it goes.”

“No?” He ducked into the room. “Okay, we’re clear.”

She rolled her eyes, still convinced his paranoia was excessive, and followed him in. “Wow!”

The room was a two-storey affair, with the ceiling high above their heads, but intersected halfway by a mezzanine floor. Consoles were dotted about the floors on both levels, but the lower level was mostly taken up by a large, pentagonal table with a hollow centre that held what could be some kind of image projector. Or, for all Elizabeth knew, it could be a water cooler. There was so much they didn’t know about the Ancients yet.

“This isn’t the control room, is it?” John asked.

“Not the one that was marked on the map...” Elizabeth frowned. “Perhaps it’s an auxiliary control room?”

“Or a war room,” he said thoughtfully.

“It’s possible,” she acknowledged without conviction, “but the Ancients were not a warlike people.”

“Sometimes you don’t get a choice.”

“There is always a choice,” she insisted, appalled at such a belief.

He looked at her. “Well, maybe that’s why I’m a soldier and you’re a diplomat.”

She looked away, one hand curling into a fist. “Maybe.”

He coughed uncertainly. “Anyway. Any of these any use?” He waved an expansive arm around the room.

Returned to a sense of purpose, Elizabeth pulled herself together and dropped her pack by the door before beginning a systematic exploration. “It’s hard to tell. We’re still just scratching the surface as to the potential of this technology and how to use it.”

“So that’s a no.” She looked at him and he shrugged. “Well, if you can’t use it, it’s not an awful lot of use to us, is it?”

“I suppose not,” she agreed absently. Looking thoughtfully at the mezzanine floor, she considered the height. There weren’t any ladders or stairs and since Ancients couldn’t fly last she’d heard – except if Ascended, but then they wouldn’t need computers – she didn’t know how they’d gotten up there. There weren’t even any consoles close enough to the edge for her to climb up.

“What are you thinking?” John asked, eying her warily with the same look her cousin used to give her when they were kids and she had an idea for something to do.

“I need you to give me a boost.”

“Up there?” He joined her under the edge of the mezzanine floor, looking up. “I should go.”

“Firstly, you wouldn’t be able to operate any of the controls or even see if one of them is the one we’re looking for.”

“I could pull you up after me.” He paused. “What _are_ we looking for?”

“The radio. If this place is anything like Gateway, we’re too far under for unassisted radio but the Ancient technology will be able to get through. And secondly,” she continued as if he hadn’t interrupted, “I’m lighter than you and you’re stronger than I am.” She raised an eyebrow at him. “Do you really think I can push you all the way up there?”

“Well, I could—” He looked around the room. “Okay, so maybe not.” She waited and he grimaced. “Okay, okay, I’ll give you a boost.”

With a bit of gymnastics she managed to get safely up onto his shoulders so that she could grip the edge of the mezzanine floor. “Are you all right?”

“Me? I’m fine, Doc. You’re as light as a feather. Don’t they feed you in that hole of yours?”

She didn’t dignify that with an answer. “I’m going up.” After a bit of a struggle she managed to roll herself onto the grey carpeted floor, her foot connecting with something as she came up.

“Hey!” came a protest from below.

“John? Are you okay?” She peered over the edge, lying on her stomach and panting slightly with effort.

He was holding his hand over his nose. “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.”

“Oh my God, I’m sorry!”

“I’m fine.” He waved at her with his free hand. “Go explore.”

“Are you sure?”

“That’s a mean back kick you’ve got there.” He let go of his nose and wrinkled it gingerly. “No damage done. Go on, get us outta here.”

She nodded and picked herself up. Looking around at the consoles, she wondered where to start. The exercise had warmed her up and she unzipped her outer jacket absently. After a second thought, she unzipped her inner jacket too.

The consoles were the usual bizarrely alien and advanced Ancient technology, the same as in Gateway, that they were really only just even beginning to figure out, and she sighed as she grimaced at the third unresponsive and unidentified set of controls. If she could just find a radio she could get them out of here – and alert the others to this new complex. A second Ancient facility; now _that_ was worth discovering. If she couldn’t get a signal out, though, there was no point in discovering it.

“Hey!” The yelp from below made her spin around – to see John’s head rising up above the floor. It was followed by his body and he soon appeared in full, standing on a little elevator that slotted into place beside the mezzanine floor. He grinned at her sheepishly. “Guess this is how the old guys got up here.”

“How did you—”

“I was just walking about, hoping I could find a place to jump up, and the floor started moving.”

“Huh.” She gave a half-shrug. “Well, that’ll be useful.”

“Yeah. Pity we didn’t find it _before_ you kicked my face in.”

She winced. “Sorry.”

“No problem. So, you figured this place out yet?”

“I need Peter. Or Rodney. Or a couple of years.”

“Okay, well, going on the assumption that we don’t have _any_ of those...”

“I know, I know. I’m trying.”

“Hey, no pressure.” He followed her to the next console and leant up against it, watching her.

Lifting her eyebrows at him, she said, “Then stop staring at me.”

He took a step back, lifting his hands in mock surrender. “Sorry.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Okay, maybe not. But at least I tried.”

She chuckled and shook her head. “I don’t think this is what we need. But I can’t even turn it on, so even if it was we couldn’t use it.”

“You don’t know where the power button is? Have you guys actually figured _anything_ out under Gateway?”

“The Ancients didn’t put power buttons on their machines, not as such. They had—” She cut herself off with a phrase she didn’t usually use.

John whistled softly. “Impressive grasp of language you’ve got there, Doc.”

She ignored him. How could she have not thought of this before? How could she have been so _stupid_? “The systems in Gateway are active because they’ve been activated by people with the gene! Otherwise no one would be able to use them. But we don’t have the gene, so we have no way to activate the systems here. We can’t use them, John! We’re stuck here. There’s no way we can get out of here, there’s no way we can contact anyone. We can’t use _any_ of this technology.” Frustrated and disappointed, she slid down the console to sit on the floor and lean against it. “Dammit!”

“Elizabeth...” John crouched down beside her. “It can’t be that bad, Elizabeth. You’ll find a way.”

“You don’t understand! It’s the way the Ancients kept their technology from falling into the wrong hands. It’s like... it’s like having the key to a car. If you’ve got the key you can start it up, but if you don’t have it you can’t go anywhere.”

“Unless you hotwire it.”

Angry with both herself and the world, not to mention the Ancients with their stupid gene-activation system, Elizabeth scowled. Feeling overheated, she struggled out of her outer jacket and flung it down on the floor grumpily. “I wouldn’t know where to begin. I can’t even hotwire a car, and at least that’s our technology. I haven’t the faintest idea how to hotwire an Ancient computer. We need Rodney.”

“Well, we don’t have Rodney.”

“That’s not helpful.”

“Thank you, I try.” She gave him a baleful look. “We can’t just give up.”

“Watch me,” she grumbled sulkily, but she knew he was right and was already turning ideas over in her head. John watched her silently.

“All right,” she said slowly. “I might be able to fiddle with some of the control circuitry, and with a lot of luck turn something on. Or possibly electrocute myself.” She smiled at John, who rolled his eyes.

“Real cute, Elizabeth.”

“But there’s no point in trying it on this console since I’m almost certain it doesn’t have the controls we need.” She moved on to the next console and scrutinised it.

John picked up her discarded jacket and trailed after her. “Shouldn’t you put this on?”

“Hmm? Oh, I’m not cold.” She frowned at the writing on the console and wished the Ancients had left some computer manuals behind. Really, this was ridiculous.

“You’re right, it _is_ warmer,” John said in surprise, making her look up again. “Whatever’s – _whoever’s –_ turning the lights on must be turning up the heat as well.”

“I only hope it knows when to stop,” Elizabeth said cautiously. Gateway hadn’t turned on lights or heaters of its own accord and she didn’t know why this place was.

“Geez, Elizabeth, I thought _I_ was paranoid. Just accept our good luck and leave worrying about overheating to when we’re actually overheating.”

He smiled at her and she forced herself to smile back, chiding herself for being so foolish. “You’re right, I’m sorry. I’ll stop looking for trouble.”

“Good. And for future reference, I’m generally right.”

“Oh?” she said in patent disbelief.

“Yes, I am. Don’t you believe me?”

“No,” she said immediately.

“Aw, come on,” he grinned. “I was right about what this place was, wasn’t I?”

“Well...”

“Yes, I was. So there you go.”

“It was a lucky guess,” she dismissed.

“You just can’t accept that I’m a genius.”

“All right then,” she challenged, “what’s twenty-seven multiplied by thirty-two?”

“Eight hundred sixty four,” he said with barely a moment’s hesitation.

She worked it out in her head and was bewildered to find he was right. “How did you know that?”

“I told you,” he said smugly. “I’m always right.”

“You said generally,” she reminded him.

“I upgraded.”

“Okay, then. If you’re always right, what am I about to say to you?”

He eyed her with amused wariness. “Probably a crushing insult, I’d say.”

“As inviting an invitation as that is, no. What I was planning to say is: If I’m going to find the radio in this place, I need to examine these consoles. If I’m going to do that, I need to be able to concentrate. If I’m going to concentrate, you need to stop talking.”

“Don’t worry about hurting my feelings,” he told her blithely. “I don’t have any. Just say ‘John, shut up’ and be done with it.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Very well. John, shut up.”

“See, that wasn’t so hard, was it?”

“That’s not shutting up, John.”

“Yes, but—”

She managed to fight down her smile. “Shut up, John.”

“Okay, okay.” He subsided cheerfully and leant back on a neighbouring console to watch her work. He managed not to talk for the next five minutes, but made up for his silence by slotting his magazine in and out of his pistol, making a loud clicking sound and reminding her of General O’Neill’s similar inability to sit still. Apparently he had no sense of rhythm, because the sound was irritatingly random.

She sighed. “Do you have to do that?”

“What?” He looked at her in confusion as he slotted the magazine back into place and then looked down at his hands. “Oh. Sorry.” He looked genuinely contrite even though she was sure he wasn’t and she felt a sudden surge of sympathy for his mother; he must have been a terror as a child.

“It’s okay. I wasn’t making much progress anyway.” She leant her elbows on the console, ignoring an indignant squeak as one of the keys moved, and studied him. “So why _did_ you bring a gun? It isn’t as if you expected to fall into an alien facility.”

“Always be prepared,” he quoted glibly. “I never joined the Boy Scouts, but they had the right idea. I figured if things got desperate I could always shoot penguins or seals for food – but don’t tell Doctor Potter I said that,” he added hastily. “He thinks their survival is more important than mine.”

“I won’t tell,” she promised, smiling.

“When I thought about getting forced down,” he continued, “I always thought it would be above ground. Being stuck underground – in an abandoned alien base, no less – definitely wasn’t on my list of possible scenarios.” He grinned self-deprecatingly and shrugged. “I’ll know better next time.”

“Let’s hope there won’t be a next time,” she sighed, turning away from the console she had been studying and looking around the room. Then she chuckled, remembering that she was supposed to be being optimistic. Usually she was, even when dealing with bomb threats and (lately) facing down alien bad guys, but she wasn’t used to be cut off in the middle of nowhere with no one knowing where she was.

“I dunno,” John said. “I’m kinda hoping there’ll be lots of next times.” She looked at him in surprise. “What? If there’s a next time then that means we get out of _this_ time with our skins intact.”

“Good point.”

“I do make them occasionally, you know.”

She nodded appeasingly, making him break into a reluctant grin. “All right, one more console to try, then we’ll keep looking for the control room.”

“Sounds like a plan. Hey, tell you what.”

“What?”

“When you get us out of here – notice I say _when_ , that’s me being supportive – I’ll teach you how to hotwire a car.”

She looked at him, chuckling in surprise. “You’ll what?”

“I’ll teach you to hotwire a car. You said you don’t know how, right?”

“And you do?” Why was she not surprised?

“I’d claim a misspent youth if that wasn’t so...”

“Cliché?”

“Not quite what I was going for, but it’ll do. So, we got a deal?”

Shaking her head with amusement, she stepped over to the last console and read through the labels on the keys, trying to put them into context and work out the purpose of the controls.

“You didn’t answer,” John pointed out, pushing off from the console he was leaning against and following her.

She couldn’t quite believe he was serious, but he looked perfectly sincere. “Okay, Major,” she said slowly. “You’re on. I get us out of here, you teach me to hotwire a car. Though I can’t imagine _why_.”

“Because it’s cool to be able to do it, even if you never actually do.” He leant against the back of the console she was working on and folded his arms over the top, peering down at the large crystal keys with curiosity. “So how does this stuff work?”

“I haven’t a clue,” she said frankly. “Rodney might be able to explain some of it to you, but I don’t think anyone has any real understanding of this technology.”

“Huh.” He reached out to touch a key lightly just as the console decided to turn on, lights flickering on under every key. “Whoa!” he said, jumping back in shock with his hands raised.

Equally startled, Elizabeth paused with her hands hovering above the keys.

“Is that supposed to happen?” he demanded.

“Well, yes, but I didn’t do anything. I’m sure I didn’t do anything.” She frowned at the console. Could this be a lone station that didn’t need activation by someone with a gene? Or... Realisation dawning, she stared at John. It couldn’t be! The odds were so very slim, and yet...

“What?” he asked, squirming slightly. “ _I_ didn’t do it.”

“I think you did,” she told him. “I think you have the gene.”

_To be concluded..._


	3. Aliens Contact Me Via The Fillings In My Teeth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to those of you who have given me such supportive feedback. I love reading your comments. I had a great time writing this story and I’m glad people are enjoying reading it.

“What?” John squinted at Elizabeth, confused and not sure what she was talking about.

Her eyes were glowing with excitement. “I think you have the Ancient gene.”

“Jean? Or gene? Like DNA?”

“Yes! This facility isn’t reacting to _our_ presence, it’s reacting to _yours_. I don’t have the gene, so you must.”

He didn’t feel any more informed. “Uh, gonna need more filling in here.”

His lacklustre response didn’t dismay her in the least: she was almost bouncing with excitement. “Didn’t I explain this?”

“I don’t think so,” he said cautiously. “I mean, I could have just missed it while I was busy trying to take in stargates and Ancients, but you left a lot out and I’m pretty sure a gene was one of those things.”

She looked a little sheepish at having been caught out. “You noticed that, did you?”

He shrugged. “Well... yeah.” He wasn’t as dumb as he looked.

With enthusiasm she explained about the Ancient gene and how it was used to activate their technology. John listened in bewilderment.

“So you’re trying to tell me I have a freaky mutant gene inside me? Get it out!”

“It’s a gene, John; you can’t get rid of it.”

He gave her his best puppy-dog look. “You sure?”

She folded away a smile, but not quickly enough to keep him from seeing it. “Yes, John.”

“Oh. I guess I’ll have to keep it, then.”

“You don’t exactly have a lot of choice in the matter,” she agreed.

“How can you be sure I’ve actually got this gene of yours? Couldn’t it just be a coincidence that thing turned on?”

She smiled at him, undaunted. “All right, then.” She backed away and patted the console behind her. “Try this one. _I_ can’t turn it on.”

He took several wary steps forward and gingerly put his hand on the top. It spectacularly failed to light up. “Nothing,” he said in a relieved tone, secretly a little disappointed. It would be cool to be able to operate alien computers. He might have gotten himself a spaceship out of it.

Elizabeth was still smiling, clearly unworried. “Not the casing, John. Touch one of the keys.”

He hesitated, almost not wanting to know, then slowly reached out to touch one of the funky crystal keys.

The console lit up with a friendly hum.

The grin on Elizabeth’s face was so big he was surprised she didn’t shout “Eureka!” or something. She didn’t say “See?” or “I told you so” either, just grinned at him proudly as if he’d completed some task of monumental skill.

“So that means we’ve found the key in our back pocket?” he asked.

“Right where we left it,” she agreed with a laugh. “We aren’t trapped!”

“Well, there, you see? I told you not to be so pessimistic.”

“If we’re going to get into I-told-you-so’s,” she retorted, “I told you you had the gene.”

“Yes, well. Let’s just agree that we’re both genii. Geniuses?” He waved away the question. “What now?”

“Now we find that control room and get ourselves out of here.”

“Oh.” He tried to inject some enthusiasm into his voice. “Okay.” It was stupid to not want this little interlude to end, especially when they weren’t sure yet that they could find their way out. But it was fun, exploring an alien base, listening to Elizabeth’s insane explanations that completely turned his world upside down, savouring the idea of being able to maybe pilot a _spaceship_ , and enjoying Elizabeth’s vivid enthusiasm (when she wasn’t drowning herself in pessimism). It was silly really, but he was enjoying himself.

Nevertheless, he followed Elizabeth over to the elevator. “Wait a moment,” she said before he could step onto it. “I want to try something first.” He obediently stayed put and watched her stand on it. It didn’t move, and she looked at him. “How long did it wait before it moved when you stood on it before?”

He shrugged. “Maybe five seconds?”

She waved him forward and he joined her on the platform. A few seconds later it descended. “It _is_ you,” she said triumphantly, hopping off before it had quite reached the floor.

He shook his head at her excitement and joined her at the door. “So, where’re we going, Doc?” he asked as they picked up their packs.

She pointed left. “We’re very close now. I think this room,” she gestured behind them, “would be a subsidiary control room, for if the main operations centre was out of commission for some reason.”

“I still think it looked like a war room,” John said as they stepped into the corridor.

She managed to scowl at him despite her enthusiasm. “The Ancients were a peaceful people.”

He grimaced. “Let’s just agree to disagree, huh?”

“Let’s.”

The corridors were becoming shorter and higher-ceilinged now, as though they were nearing the central section of the complex. Elizabeth stared around them with fascinated awe, and John couldn’t help mimicking her. It was a pretty impressive place. _And_ it was a real alien base – how cool was that!

They turned a corner, John in the lead, but he stopped so abruptly that Elizabeth cannoned into him. He reached back to steady her, not taking his eyes from the sight ahead.

“We’re here,” Elizabeth said quietly.

It was a large hexagonal room, decorated in the usual elves-meets-dwarves style that John now associated with Ancients. Absently he slipped off his pack as he looked around, taking it in. There were consoles arranged in a loose circle around the edge of the room, as well as two entranceways in addition to the one in which he and Elizabeth stood. The centre of the room was taken up by a smaller room, also hexagonal, which had six doorways leading up to a dais in the dead centre of the room, on which stood a funky sort of chair.

All in all, it was a pretty impressive setup, giving the impression of a lot of power but somehow sorrowful at the same time. It was, he thought, the emptiness of the room where there should have been at least half a dozen people operating controls.

“There’s a control chair!” Elizabeth exclaimed excitedly at his elbow.

“That’s good?”

“Very good. Especially if you have a strong ATA gene.” John banished the involuntary image of a double helix attempting to lift weights and jogged after Elizabeth as she made a beeline for the central room. He caught her arm before she could enter it and she looked at him with exasperation. “You can _see_ there’s no one there, John.”

“Yes, but there might be booby-traps or something.”

“The Ancients—”

“Weren’t like that. Yeah, I got it. I’m sure they weren’t – though you seem a bit obsessed with them, if you don’t mind my saying so – but who knows who – what – came after them.”

“John...”

“Just humour me, okay?” She rolled her eyes and crossed her arms, but acquiesced. “Thanks.”

He stepped in cautiously, scanning all the entrances and the roof. No one seemed to be hiding behind the chair... Maybe he’d just been watching too many Indiana Jones movies. Not everyone felt the need to leave behind traps for later visitors.

But the moment he was fully within the room, just as he turned back to Elizabeth to announce the all clear, doors slammed down around all the entrances, locking him in and Elizabeth out.

“Elizabeth!” He spun, looking about wildly and seeing no exits, then turned to the door between them. Stepping forward, he hoped it would work like the elevator and magically do what he wanted. The door didn’t open. He pounded on it. “Dammit, open up!”

_No_.

He stopped pounding, his hands resting against the door. It hadn’t been the sound of real voices: the word, spoken by multiple voices in unison, had come from inside his head. It hadn’t even been a word, just an inchoate thought. Elizabeth was getting to him – he didn’t even think this was weird. “Open up. I want to see Elizabeth.”

_She is unnecessary_ , was the message behind this thought.

“No she’s not. Now open the damn door.”

_She does not have the mark_.

The mark? “You mean that mutant gene? Are you telling me the high and mighty Ancients were in to eugenics? I don’t care if she has gerbil genes, open the door!”

_She is not needed_ , the voices insisted and he panicked a little, wondering what they would do to someone they considered unnecessary.

“ _I_ need her. Open up or I’ll blow this place to kingdom come.”

A pause, as if they were considering this. Or possibly wondering what ‘kingdom come’ meant. _If we let her in, will you stay?_

“What, here?”

_Yes_.

It was his turn to hesitate. “For how long?”

_We are in need of purpose_.

“Who’s we?”

_We are what is. We are that which Thinks_.

“Uh... You mean like the computer?” Talking computers probably made complete sense to people who could travel between planets.

_Ye-es. We are the computer._

“Look, I can’t stay. I’ve got a life! Sorry,” he added, not entirely truthfully. “Open the door.”

There was another pause, as if the voices were considering their options in a silent debate. _If you insist on leaving we will not keep you._

“Great!” he said in relief. Possessive computers made good movies but bad real life.

_But you must take the component with you._

“The who?”

There was a quiet swooshing sound above his head. John looked up, raising his pistol, to see the roof telescope open to form a hole in the centre through which a rectangular object about a metre long and half a metre wide and deep was lowering itself with some kind of anti-grav technology (at least he guessed it was lowering itself, since he couldn’t see any ropes). It hopped over the chair without touching it and hovered in front of John, who pointed his weapon at it uncertainly but was pretty sure bullets wouldn’t do much to its metallic hide.

“What is _that_?” he demanded of the voices. They didn’t answer. The thing moved a little closer and John took a step back, his shoulder bumping the wall. He put out his free hand to steady himself.

_This is the component_ , the voices said. _It will do you no harm._

“Took you a while to answer,” John sniped.

_We can only speak directly to you when you touch a part of this room. Otherwise we can hear you but you cannot hear us_.

“You can hear me? Wait, it was you! You turned up the heat!”

_We did. We also provided you with the map you asked for and activated the ring transporter for you. Did you not wish these things done?_

“No, no, that’s fine,” he assured them hastily. He didn’t want to know what they would do if they were unhappy or thought he was unhappy. “Great, in fact. Wonderful. What _is_ this thing?”

_It is the component_.

“Yeah, you said that. Surprisingly, that’s not really all that helpful.” He wondered if computers could detect sarcasm and studied the ‘component’ warily. It wasn’t much to look at, a boxy little machine with the front sloping forward, quite like a _Star Trek_ shuttle in shape and ungainliness. The front and sides were decorated with blinking lights.

_It will allow us to communicate with you where ever you may go. It will assist you if you allow it._

The machine beeped, and somehow John knew the sound was a greeting. He groaned. “Hi, R2.”

_Are-too_? the voices and machine asked in concert.

“He’s a little droid from a movie—Never mind, I don’t think the old guys had _Star Wars_. Do you mind if I call you R2 instead of ‘component’? It’s a bit... friendlier.” The droid beeped in happy agreement and John sighed. “My life has gotten seriously weird in the last twenty four hours.”

_You will accept it?_ the voices asked pleadingly. _It will only help you. We mean you no harm._ Yes, because he could trust the word of spooky voices in his head.

“Why do you care?” he demanded. “Why do you want this thing following me around?”

The voices were silent a moment. _It has been a very long time since anyone has come to this place. Our people all left or died in the plague. We are... lonely._

And because it spoke in feelings and thoughts as well as words, John didn’t just hear the word ‘lonely’, he _felt_ the depth and intensity of the emotion they felt, the pain of ten thousand years alone under the ice. “I can’t take R2 everywhere,” he warned. “People would talk. Flying robot...” he squinted at R2, “... _things_ aren’t exactly standard issue where I come from.”

_It need not follow you always_ , the voices agreed hopefully, _but if you could keep it near you so that sometimes we might speak with you... we would be grateful._

He thought of something. “When Elizabeth and I get out of here – assuming of course that you let us out – we’ll tell people about this place. Her people are very interested in Ancient technology, your kind of technology, and soon there’ll be heaps of people here for you to talk to.”

_That would be agreeable,_ the voices said wistfully. _But they will not be you. Nor do we believe they will be able to talk with us as you can. Your people are not like our people and they do not carry the mark. But you do, and you are very strong. We felt you passing us, even at a distance, and we waited for you to come. But you didn’t come and so we brought you here._

“How?” he demanded suspiciously. “You don’t mean the snowstorm. Do you?”

_The power was ours. You would not come and we were so lonely. Please take the component with you, it will do as you order it and it won’t be in your way. We would like to be able to speak with you so very much._

It wasn’t the natural wariness of angering something capable of causing a snowstorm that made him agree, but the plaintiveness in their voices. Some discussion, argument, and explanation later, the voices released the doors, all of which slid up into the ceiling, and John dashed out, looking for Elizabeth. The voices had assured him they hadn’t done anything to her and he was pretty sure they were sincere, but he wanted to see it with his own eyes.

She looked up from the console she’d been scowling at and a smile of relief broke forth on her face. “John!” She ran to him but didn’t quite lose her composure enough to throw her arms around him. “I was so worried! How did you get the doors to open? You were quite right to be cautious, that shouldn’t have happened.”

“I told you before,” he smiled cockily. “I’m always right.”

“I think I’m starting to believe you,” she said, shaking her head at her own gullibility.

“That’s—” R2 bumped into him from behind and John frowned back at the droid. “R2, I know I agreed you could follow me around, but you don’t have to stick so close.”

R2 beeped an impenitent apology and Elizabeth peered around him to stare at it. “Have you made a new friend, John?”

“He’s been assigned to follow me. Little twerp.” R2 beeped rudely and John scowled at it. “No one asked you.” It made a sound uncannily like a kid chanting ‘na-ner na-ner na-nyah’ and he had to grin.

Elizabeth raised an eyebrow at him. “I have a feeling you’ve got a lot to tell me.”

“Yeah, kinda. Come on, let’s sit in here.” He led her into the computer’s room and pulled her down to sit beside him on the dais. She looked at him expectantly and he put his hand on the floor. “You can hear me, right?” he asked the ceiling.

_We hear you_.

“Good. Feel free to speak up if I explain something wrong.” He grinned at the look on Elizabeth’s face. “No, I haven’t gone crazy.”

“You sure?”

“Well, no. But if I’m crazy you are too. On the other hand, I found out who’s been doing the dusting.”

“Really? Who?”

“Well, long story short: I found someone who’s still alive down here.”

“Still alive? After at least ten _thousand_ years?”

“It’s the computer. Or they’re the computer, whatever. I guess these old guys built to last, because it’s still going strong. It’s alive, or whatever you call it.”

“Sentient?”

“Yeah, that. It can talk to me – and you have _no_ idea how weird that is – because apparently I have a really strong mark. I _think_ that means that gene of yours. But the computer’s been here so long by itself that they’re lonely. So they gave me R2 here so that they can keep talking to me.”

Elizabeth’s expression gave him a good idea of what he must have looked like earlier when she started on about stargates and aliens. “The computer didn’t call that R2,” she said weakly.

“No, the voices in my head call it the ‘component’, whatever that means.” He hesitated. “Is it bad that I’m not even disturbed by that sentence?”

Elizabeth rubbed her forehead. “I suppose for the Ancients, telepathic computers were par for the course.”

“Just a bit hard on us mere mortals.”

“So the computer is lonely,” she summed up carefully, “and it gave you R2. To stop being lonely.”

“If ol’ R2 here comes home with me, the computer can talk to me anywhere on the planet, even where radio wouldn’t normally work. Their kind of radio isn’t technically radio, it uses a sub-space phase space with waveforms that are non-matter-interfering, allowing sub-sub-atomic tunnelling of the space-time continuum, and so isn’t restricted by the speed of light.” He paused, running that back over in his head. “I have no idea what I just said. What the hell did that mean?”

“Their radio is better than ours,” Elizabeth summarised, looking half shocked and half amused.

“Right.” He nodded. “I like your version better.”

“So the computer is able to talk to you anywhere – and it wants to because it’s lonely.” She shook her head in disbelief, her eyes alight with interest. “We haven’t encountered any indications that the Ancients used sentient computers.”

“I don’t think they normally do. Did. Okay, this is kinda hard to explain because the voices mostly don’t use words, they talk in thoughts, ideas, and I have to figure out a lot of the words, but... Near as I can work out, this place is like an isolated suburb of Atlantis; well, of where Atlantis was, I didn’t quite follow that bit. It wasn’t part of the actual city. It was a research facility – which explains why we kept finding labs – and basically self-contained, so they held out against that plague better than most of the old guys did. I think – and don’t quote me on this – that they were mostly doing computer research here, playing with AI, and the main computer is the result of that work. It came to life spontaneously. Only then the plague took over and all the people left or died and the computer’s been alone ever since.”

“That’s terrible,” she said sympathetically. “But fascinating! John, this is incredible. What else did it tell you?”

He tried to remember everything, prompted by the voices and R2; about the snowstorm and how the computer could hear him anywhere in the base, how they spoke to him in his head and had tried to carry out his wishes. He pointed out the place in the roof where R2 had appeared and told her how the components kept the place clean and tidy, waiting for the next occupants. She drank in everything, listening in awe. “So then,” he concluded, “once I convinced the voices in my head we’re all going to play happily, they let me out. And here we are.”

“This is amazing!”

What amazed John was the exhilaration in her voice and how she just about bubbled over with enthusiasm. “Yeah,” he agreed.

“There’s so much information here, about the Ancients, about their society and their technology... Studying the computer could help us learn so much about the nature of consciousness. We might even be able to answer some very old questions about the soul!”

He shook his head. “They won’t let you do that.”

She frowned at him. “Why not?”

“Would you let people pull you apart to find out what makes you tick? It’s not some laptop computer, Elizabeth, it’s _alive_. It should have the same rights as any human.”

“You’re right,” she agreed immediately, chagrin in her face. “I’m sorry. But... I don’t think that will stop some of the higher-ups.”

He shrugged. “They won’t be able to do anything to it. They can’t. I don’t think you get it, Elizabeth, the computer isn’t _in_ the base, the computer _is_ the base. Even if you could somehow convince them to let you experiment, I don’t think you could actually do it.”

She raised both eyebrows. “This _is_ amazing.”

“You don’t have to tell me. I’m the one with voices in my head.”

Smiling, she considered him. “It said you have a strong gene?”

“Assuming mark means the same thing as gene, yeah. Why?”

“It could sense your presence, even at a distance.”

“Yeah,” he said slowly, not following where she was trying to go.

“Did it ever sense anyone else?”

He listened. “Uh, a while back there was someone, someone who used the weapons platform.”

“General O’Neill.” She nodded. “We’ve had over a dozen people come through Gateway since who have the gene.” She looked at him questioningly.

“Nope, didn’t sense any of them.” A slow smile blossomed over her face. “Elizabeth?”

“Of the people on my team with the gene, there is no one with such a strongly-expressed gene as General O’Neill. They can make the technology work with training and concentration but he only needs to think about it. It comes naturally to him.”

John nodded. “The voices say that’s how it’s supposed to be.”

“That’s how it is for you?”

“Uh, apparently. Why? Where are you going with this?”

“John, what we’re doing under Gateway isn’t just researching the Ancient technology. Gateway is the outpost left behind after the Ancients left in Atlantis.”

“ _In_ Atlantis?”

“Atlantis was a city, but it was a city that could fly.”

He raised his eyebrows and gave a slight shrug; soon he wouldn’t be surprised if she told him these Ancients created the universe. “Cool.”

“They were suffering from a plague and so they left Earth to go somewhere else. We’re currently trying to find out exactly where it was they went and while we wait I’m putting together an expedition team so that when we locate Atlantis, where ever it is, we can go there.” She beamed at him and he almost laughed at her fervent enthusiasm.

“Sounds like an adventure.”

“Oh, it is so much _more_ than that!” she breathed. “The opportunities for expanding human understanding and—”

“Hey!” he interrupted. “You had me at adventure, Elizabeth.”

“Oh. Right.” She gave an embarrassed chuckle and he almost told her that he _liked_ her enthusiasm. “Well, I’m offering you a chance to be a part of that.”

“Me?” His instinct was to say yes, without hesitation, but he pulled himself back. “You might want to check my record before offering me a job,” he warned. She deserved to know all the facts. “And I don’t know how pleased the voices in my head will be at the idea of me haring off to where they can’t talk to me any more.”

_It will be acceptable_ , the voices said obligingly. _We will find ways to communicate_.

“All right, the voices say it’s okay with them. But you still need to check my record first.”

“It won’t tell me anything I don’t already know,” she said simply. “You tend to be insubordinate and you don’t like following orders you don’t agree with. But you don’t agree with them because it conflicts with your sense of ethics and you constantly try to do what _you_ feel is right.”

“Oh.” He was taken aback and not sure how she’d worked that lot out. It made him sound almost noble, and John was pretty sure he wasn’t noble. “Well, I’m glad to see you appreciate my finer qualities,” he joked weakly.

“Naturally,” she agreed with mock seriousness.

“I still don’t have security clearance, though. No matter how much you tell me, I’m still not supposed to know it.”

“You’ll get it,” she said immediately and with rock-solid certainty.

“You’re that important?” he said in surprise. But then he realised he wasn’t as surprised as he should have been, because there was a boundless confidence about her that _made_ her important.

“Not me, the gene.”

“The gene?” Whatever he’d been expecting, that wasn’t it.

“As I said, we have no one with a strongly expressed gene on my team. We need you.”

Disappointed and even a little hurt, he said, “So what, I’m just a gene with legs?”

She rolled her eyes, wearing the timeless expression of a woman trying to be patient in the face of a man’s stupidity. “No, John, I want _you_ on my team. Why do you think I’ve been telling you classified information? The gene is what convinces the higher-ups you’re worth bringing along. Trust me, once they catch wind of just how strong your gene is, they’ll be begging you to join up.”

“Really?” He thought about his last meeting with the brass. “I find that kinda hard to believe.”

“That’s because you don’t realise how rare this gene is. Without it, you’re an asset. _With_ it, you’re indispensable.”

“Indispensable, huh? I kinda like the sound of that.”

R2 beeped in amusement and Elizabeth smiled. “Just think about it, John. That’s all I ask.”

“I can do that.”

“Good.” She stood up. “Now, are we going to stay here all day or are we going to find out how to contact the outside world?”

_You are leaving?_ the voices asked worriedly.

“Only for a little while. We’ll be back, don’t worry. Besides, R2’s gonna follow me round, right?”

_Of course. We apologise._

“No problem.” He stood and caught Elizabeth’s expression. “What? I have to keep the voices in my head happy.” She laughed. “Right, R2, where do we find a radio in this place?”

The droid beeped happily and swooshed off towards one of the control panels. John followed it and wrinkled his nose at the indecipherable script.

“Elizabeth, little help?”

She came up beside him. “You have to turn it on first.”

“Right. I knew that.” He reached out and touched a key at random, causing the whole board to light up. “That’s never gonna get old. You know how to work this thing?”

She frowned at the console dubiously. “Not as such.” She looked at the droid floating beside him and he followed her gaze.

“Right, R2, voices. Could someone please hook this thing up so we can call our friends on the radio?”

R2 beeped and John frowned. “What do you mean, _I_ can do it?” The machine swooped over to the chair and circled it eagerly. “You want me to sit in that thing? How’s that going to help?”

But Elizabeth ushered him over. “It makes sense, John.”

“It does?”

“The control chairs let people like you, people with the gene, interface with the computer systems.”

“Do I _want_ to interface with the computer systems?” That sounded dangerous. Voices in his head was one thing, but deliberately courting this, this whatever-it-was...

She smiled at him. “You do if you want to get out of here.”

With a reluctant sigh but trusting her implicitly, he sat down and leant back gingerly.

And the voices were there again, in his head, only this time he was one of the voices. They spoke when he spoke and he spoke when they spoke and it was the most drowningest moment of his life but he was in complete control. He knew, somehow, without knowing, exactly what he needed to do.

He opened his eyes and smiled. Elizabeth looked at him questioningly, but before she could speak there was the sudden hiss of an open radio channel. Lifting his chin, John spoke to the ceiling. “McMurdo, this is Sheppard. Do you read?”

“Major! We read you loud and clear. What happened? Where are you?”

John looked at Elizabeth. “That’s a... long, complicated story.”

* * *

**Epilogue – Warning: Universe May Contain Nuts**

The transporter rings took them to an access shaft that had been carved through ten thousand years’ worth of ice (Elizabeth looked at the droid faithfully trailing after John and wondered just how many of the things there were) and Elizabeth and John clambered up and out into the bright Antarctic morning. Lifting up her hand to shade her eyes while she fumbled for her sunglasses, Elizabeth looked around at the snowy wastes.

R2 beeped behind her. “R2 says our chopper’ll be unburied by tomorrow,” John told her as he dropped his pack into the snow. “I can come back and get it then.”

“If I know Rodney,” she told him, dropping her own pack with a sigh of relief, “it’ll be someone else coming to get it. _You_ will be sitting in a control chair somewhere providing a light show.”

He thought about it. “Nah, that doesn’t sound like much fun. I think I’ll come back here instead. You wanna come?”

Smiling at the thought of exploring this new Ancient outpost without worrying about how to get out, Elizabeth said, “Definitely.”

“Thought you might.” He smirked at her. “It’s my animal magnetism.”

She laughed. “Hardly. I’m much more interested in the voices in your head.”

He sighed melodramatically. “Figures. I guess I’ll have to take what I can get. Hey, R2, you mind doubling as a seat?” The droid only had time for a questioning beep before John sat on it. It beeped indignantly, but didn’t shake him off. “Thanks.” He patted the metal beside him. “Come join me, Elizabeth.”

She took a step forward. “Are you sure it won’t mind?”

“Nah, he’s fine. I think,” he added in a stage whisper, “he’s got a crush on you.”

“Is that supposed to reassure me?”

The droid beeped happily and she smiled, completely understanding why John had named it R2. She sat down next to John, the droid just big enough for them both, as R2 started a low mechanical purr.

John snorted in amusement. “Think he’s happy?”

She patted the metal casing. “It certainly sounds like it.”

They sat in companionable silence for a moment, listening to the droid’s purr.

“So,” Elizabeth said, “since you were the one who got us out, does that mean the deal’s off?”

He didn’t miss a beat. “Nope. Turns out it was my fault we were in this mess in the first place, so it was up to me to get us out, don’t you think? That means I owe you.”

“John, you’re the only reason we know this place even exists. I’m the one who owes _you_.”

“In that case, you can pay me back by letting me teach you how to hotwire a car,” he returned immediately. “Maybe even how to pick locks too.”

She chuckled. “What were you, a criminal in another life?”

“Nope. Just _really_ bad at keeping track of my keys.”

She stared at his deadpan expression. Then he quirked his eyebrows at her and she laughed so hard he had to grab her arm to keep her from falling into the snow.

The low sound of a helicopter in the distance reached them, the machine getting nearer to where they sat shoulder to shoulder on the purring droid. “Our ride is on its way.” John sighed, sounding a little disappointed. “And now it’s all over bar the shouting.”

She chuckled but pointed out, “It’s not over yet. Will you join my expedition team, John? This place is remarkable but our goal is still Atlantis. I have to warn you, though, it could be a one way trip, at least at first. We may never be able to return to Earth.”

“I don’t know... I’ll have to think about it. I kinda like it here in Antarctica.”

“Of course,” she said hastily. “I quite understand.” It was a lot to ask, she knew, and not everyone was as willing as she to give up everything. She’d just hoped...

He nudged her shoulder with his own. “I’m just kidding you, Elizabeth. Me and the voices in my head are ready to follow you across the universe.”

She grinned at him, stupidly happy – and not because he had the gene and was coming, but because _he_ was coming. “I’ll hold you to that, Major.”

He waved to the approaching helicopter as it turned to head directly for them, but didn’t bother to stand up as he matched her grin with his own. “Oh, I’m counting on it, Doc.”

_Fin_


End file.
